Zwane M suggested using tbench as a load to test one of his recent patches and gave me the idea to try using tbench_load in contest. Here are the first set of results I got while running tbench 4 continuously (uniprocessor machine):

This is a massive difference. Sure tbench was giving better numbers on 2.5.61 but it caused a massive slowdown. I wondered whether this translates into being more susceptible to ping floods or DDOS attacks? You should have seen tbench 16 - 3546 seconds!